People who own a physical asset often want to have the option of obtaining a matching digital asset. For example, owners of print books desire electronic versions of those physical books, and do not want to pay the full price for the eBook. One approach to this problem is described in International Patent Application Publication No. 2014/015437. That method and system provide a way for a book owner to validate their ownership of a physical media carrier (a book) and to obtain the associated digital asset, such as an eBook.
Previous solutions and industry standard approaches to book recognition are limited in their capabilities. Chen, David, Sam Tsai, Bernd Girod, et al. (2010), “Building book inventories using smartphones,” in: Proceedings of the international conference on Multimedia, pp. 651-654 (hereinafter Chen et al.), and Tsai, Sam et al. (2011), “Combining image and text features: a hybrid approach to mobile book spine recognition,” in: Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Multimedia, pp. 1029-1032 (hereinafter Tsai et al.) present an approach that assumes the existence of a dataset describing the visual appearance of a relatively small number of book spines. This is problematic for a practical system in which it may be required to identify books selected out of millions of possibilities, rather than thousands as in the method of (Chen et al.). They demonstrated their method on a preconstructed database of 2300 book spines containing 5398 words. (Chen et al.) also make use of a limited set of features that can be inadequate for accurate identification on a large practical scale.
The system of (Tsai et al.) further uses an optical character recognition (OCR) engine to read the text that is on a spine and then matches that text against a database of book metadata. That book metadata commonly includes the title, subtitle, and author names. However, (Tsai et al.) is also limited for example in its ability to adapt to practical situations.
Hsu, Cheng-Hsin et al. (2011), “Smartphone-based asset management system,” US Patent Application Publication No. 2012/0202515, (hereinafter the '515 application), discloses a method and systems relating to the research of (Chen et al.). Specifically, a method of tracking an inventory of objects via a mobile communications device is disclosed. The method comprises acquiring an image, collecting the location of the mobile device, and transferring the location and image to a remote server so that the spines can be identified, located, and their identity and location stored on a database. However, the '515 application is limited for example in that it requires a populated database of spine appearances for operation.
Williams, Oliver M. C. and Michael A. Isard (2009), “Object recognition and library,” U.S. Pat. No. 8,473,481, (hereinafter Williams and Isard 2009) also claims a method for creating an object library comprising receiving an image, locating the portion of the image corresponding to an object surface and its boundary, identifying that located surface from a plurality of images of surfaces, and adding a record of that object into an object library. However, this approach is also limited for example in that it requires a populated database of spine appearances for operation.
Therefore there is a need for a method and system for identifying books on a bookshelf that obviates or mitigates one or more limitations of the prior art.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should it be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.